University Microfilms, a XERQ\Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

$University Microfilms, a XERQ\Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan$ 72- 15,293 SHARP, Nicholas Andrew, 1944- SHAKESPEARE'S BAROQUE COMEDY: THE WINTER'S TALE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XERQ\Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED SHAKESPEARE'S BAROQUE CŒEDY: THE V/INTER'S TALE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Nicholas Andrew Sharp, B,A., M,A, ***** The Ohio State University 1971 Approved by Id^iser Department of English PLEASE NOTE: Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company Acknowledgraent I am extremely grateful to my adviser, Professor Rolf Soellner, for his advice, suggestions, and constant encouragement. ii VITA January 24, 1944 . Born— Kansas City, Missouri 1966 ......... B.A., The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 1966-1970........... NDEA Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1968-1969, 1971-1972 . Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1968 .......... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENT..................................... ii VITA ..................................... .•.......... iii INTRODUCTION: BAROQUE AS AN HISTORICAL CONCEPT .... 1 Chapter I. THE JACOBEAN SETTING AND THE BAROQUE AESTHETIC 16 II. THE THEME OF SKEPTICAL FIDEISM............... 45 III. THE STRUCTURE................................ 81 IV. THE CHARACTERIZATION......................... 114 CONCLUSION .............. 150 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED ......... 154 iv INTRODUCTION BAROQUE AS AN HISTORICAL CONCEPT In Endeavors of Art (Madison: Wisconsin U. Press, 1954) Mad eleine Doran has argued that Shakespearean drama manifests an es sentially Renaissance aesthetic form. Basing her ideas upon one of the five principles for distinguishing Renaissance from Baroque set forth by the art historian Friedrich Woelfflin, she believes that Shakespeare's major plays reveal the “multiple unity*’ or "unity • • • achieved by a harmony of free parts" which is characteristic of the Renaissance spirit and perception.^ Focused primarily upon Shake speare's romantic comedies and high tragedies, her argument reveals a remarkable scholarly grasp of the context of Elizabethan dramatic theory and practice, and so far as she carries it, her thinking is extraordinarily enlightening. Professor Doran, however, has little to say about Shakespeare's late plays, and with good reason; for the late plays are just as certainly Baroque as the earlier ones are Renaissance. The formal unity revealed by Cymbeline, The Tempest, and especially The Winter's Tale is distinctly the "unified unity" or "union of parts in a single theme . by the subordination, to one unconditioned dominant, of Heinrich Woelfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger %New York: Henry Holt, 1932), p. 15. all other elenents" which Woelfflin defines as fundamental to the 2 Baroque style and perception. This fact, though it is widely recog nized among students of Baroque literature and has been suggested by a few Shakespeareans, has exerted almost no influence upon critical thinking about the late plays.^ It is, however, a fact of potentially crucial value in breaking from the pattern of mythico-theological criticism which, as Hallett Smith pointed out several years ago, has become so tiresomely dominant in approaches to the romances. More importantly, perhaps, it is a fact which should be of central importance in understanding how and why Shakespeare's style under went such remarkable change after the writing of Pericles in 1609. In this study, then, I intend both to emulate Doran and to contradict her. Like her, I intend to rely rather heavily upon Woelf- flin's theories; Woelfflin's idea that aesthetic form reveals how an artist thinks, while substance or intellectual content reveals what he is thinking, though it posits an impossibly neat distinction between form and content, has been proved useful for literary crit icism by Doran's own highly informative study.^ Like her I intend Woelfflin, Principles, p. 15. See Samuel Leslie Bethel1, The Winter's Tale: A Study (London: Staples, 1947), pp. 107-17; Carl Joachim Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque 1610-1660, The Rise of M odem Europe Series, ed. William L, Langer (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), p. 48; Frank J. Wamke, "Baroque Poetry and the Experience of Contradiction," Colloquia Ger- manica, 1 (1967), 48. ^Hallett Smith, "Shakespeare's Last Plays: Facts and Problems," SRO, 3 (1967), 9-16. A most useful over view of criticism on the romances. ^For the distinction between formal and iconographie criticism see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford Ü. Press, 193), 3 to focus particularly upon the nature of formal unity in the drama; unity of form is a universal quality of all good drama, and, thus, it is familiar and easy to deal with. In slight contradiction to Doran*s (and Woelfflin*a) methodology, however, I will not try to avoid all dealings with thematic content; completely to divorce form from content is an impossible ideal anyway, as Woelfflin*s attempts to do so have shown.^ Moreover, to avoid dealing with the intellec tual substance of a work forces one also to ignore the important question of how form relates to content, a major issue in understanding any play. More importantly, however, I will differ with a part, at least, of Doran*s conclusion that Shakespearean dramatic form is essentially Renaissance. The Winter*s Tale and, by extension, the other Romances as well, are works in a basically Baroque style, and their Baroque quality can be seen upon the same spectrum as Doran used in measuring the Renaissance quality of Shakespeare's earlier plays. I am not, of course, attempting to deal with the whole question of periodization in Shakespeare's style. My focus is on the last plays, the romances. Whether the high tragedies are Baroque or the problem plays Mannerist are questions outside the scope of my interest. That Shakespeare's earlier works are Renaissance, I believe, is almost universally admitted. In this study I am primarily concerned with arguing that The Winter's Tale and the other late plays, especially when contrasted to the earlier ones, are demonstrably Baroque. An unimpeachable definition of Baroque, however, is a very ^See, e.g.. Principles, pp. 159-63. 4 difficult item to produce at the present time because the term has gone through so many shifts and mutations since Woelfflin first made it a descriptive rather than a pejorative word. The rigorously formal and stylistic definition which Woelfflin used has become almost im possible to accept per se, even in his particular field of art his tory. And what few attempts have been made at transferring, all of Woelfflin*8 categories directly into literary studies have proved that major problems exist in even the most scrupulous applications 7 of his entire theory. Of course, Woelfflin*s thinking has not been entirely rejected; he remains the greatest of the theorists. But many alternatives and modifications have been proposed to strengthen the weaknesses in his ideas. In fact, theories and explanations of the Baroque have so proliferated, and in so many different directions, that difficulties in using the term almost inevitably develop when one must choose to use a single approach from the many intelligent proposals which have been made. The most significant change in Woelfflin's basic pattern has come in the attitudes toward Mannerism. Once widely held to be a minor transitional style aspiring to be both Renaissance and Baroque but failing at both. Mannerism is now usually recognized as a major style of its own. Works which Woelfflin could unhesitatingly identify as Baroque are viewed as thoroughly Mannerist by many modern critics. The implications for W6elfflin*s theory are quite significant. One See, e.g.; Darnell Higgins Roaten and Federico Sanchez y Es- crabano, Woelff1in*s Principles in Spanish Drama 1500-1700 (New York: Hispanic Institute, 1952). 5 very important scholar, Ernst Robert Curtins, for instance, has ar gued that Mannerism is a preferable term to Baroque in virtually all literary contexts, and a disciple of Curtius has interpreted the Baroque period as merely an historical era dominated by a Mannerist O style. Such ideas are extreme, of course, but they are the products of serious and important thinkers. They indicate the kind of problem which now exists in the use of the term Baroque. Almost always, however, modern thinking about the Baroque begins with Woelfflin. Certainly in this study at least one of Woelfflin*s stylistic categories. Renaissance multiple unity and Baroque unified unity, is crucial to the definition of the term. "Baroque," however, has come to mean so much more than it meant to Woelfflin that, even despite some aestheticians* urgings to the contrary, some explanation and definition of the term is a useful and important requirement for 9 those who would use it. In modern thinking about the Baroque, three basic types of definition prevail.The three are interlocking; they O Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 273-301; Blake Lee Spahr, "Baroque and Mannerism: Epoch and Style," Colloquia Germanica, 1 (1967), 78-100. 9 Clifford Amyx in "Style and Method," Colloquia Germanica, 1 (1967), 26-37, suggests that Baroque needs no further defining. limit myself to discussing "modem thinking," meaning studies published since World War II, because it seems useless to re-examine trends already well chronicled in two works on the Baroque. Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," JAAC, 5. (1946), 97-103, Giuliano Pelligrini’s "Shakespeare e gli studi sul barocco inglese," Barocco Inglese, Biblioteca di Cultura Contemporanea, 41 (Messina: G. D ’Anna, 1953), pp. 33-49, provides a usefula and thorough account of the idea of the Baroque in relation to Shake speare.

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